The Kidnapped Child Who Became a Poet
Shane McCrae is an award-winning poet best-known for works such as Mule and In the Language of My Captor. But as many of his readers may have already deduced, his acclaimed works have been inspired by the trauma he suffered as a child. Indeed, Shane was not only abducted as a tot, but he was then subjected to years of physical and mental abuse. And the perpetrators were two of his own grandparents!
For Sale
The drama began in 1979 when a three-year-old Shane was taken to his maternal grandfather and grandmother’s Salem home by his father, Stanley. The youngster had only been scheduled to spend the night there.
But when his dad returned to pick him up the following morning, he made a startling discovery. Not only had the house been stripped bare, there was also a ‘For Sale’ sign in front of it.
Birth certificate
So what had been the motivation behind Shane’s abduction by his own grandparents? Well, they, and their daughter Denise, were white. The tot’s father, however, was Black. And the pair didn’t want their grandson to grow up in a mixed-race family.
In fact, the couple were so prejudiced that they registered Shane as Caucasian on his birth certificate and made sure that his dad’s name was nowhere to be found, too.
The Baker name
Speaking to The New York Times decades later, Stanley revealed how this situation had occurred. Referring to a conversation he’d had with Denise just after Shane was born, he said, “I’m like, ‘When do I need to sign the birth certificate?’
And she was like, ‘Well, actually, I wanted to talk to you about that because my dad can’t have kids.’ And he was saying that if you let him put Shane in the Baker name, when he passes, everything he has will go to Shane.”
Family funeral
Stanley revealed that although he had been skeptical at first, he was also delighted that his son would be financially secure. Things only went sour when the pair split and Denise, unable to cope with the pressures of being a single mom, handed over custody to Stanley.
The latter recalled the last time he saw his son for 13 years had been when he dropped Shane off ahead of a family funeral, and how he had been left bereft by his sudden disappearance.
Being punished
“Shane was my world,” said Stanley. He continued, “I was raised in church to believe that everybody had good in them. When I lost Shane, I totally turned to God.”
“I’m like, I’ve evidently been messing up in my life, and I’m being punished. I became a deacon in the church and would pray on my knees and ask for my kid to show up and for me to be able to find him.”
Better way of life
So where was Denise in all this? Well, Shane’s grandparents had managed to convince her that they could offer her son a better way of living than Stanley, and they subsequently moved to Texas.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she told The New York Times about her decision, and the fact that she’d kept her ex-partner entirely in the dark the whole time. “I was not ready to be a mom. And I will regret that for the rest of my life.”
Lone Star State
Denise claims that she did attempt to reclaim Shane once her parents had settled in the Lone Star State. But her father issued a chilling threat: if she tried to take the boy, then they would once again move.
This time it would be to Mexico, and she’d never set eyes on him ever again. Denise recalled, “I was just scared to death. But I have no idea why I didn’t just take him.”
Disparaging remarks
In his autobiography Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, Shane recalled how his grandad had displayed no qualms about revealing his racist side: he would often make disparaging remarks about people of color in front of him.
Shane was also told that his ability to tan easily was why he looked different from the maternal side of his family. If that wasn’t bad enough, his grandmother was equally prejudiced, too.
Untrue story
In a 2023 interview with The Guardian, Shane remarked, “She thought that marking me down as white would be some kind of advantage in life. Not quite sure how she envisioned that playing out.”
And both grandparents repeatedly told the youngster that his dad had no interest in ever seeing him again. Sadly, for reasons she struggles to explain, Shane’s mother also corroborated this untrue story as well.
Physical abuse
That’s right: although Denise never lived with her parents while they were raising her son, she was still said to have been under their total control. And so she went along with the idea that Stanley had abandoned all parental responsibility.
She also kept up the charade that her son was white whenever she occasionally dropped by to see him. Shane was later told by Denise that she’d suffered physical abuse at the hands of her father.
Thrown into a wall
That’s something to which Shane could sadly relate as well. He was regularly beaten up by his grandparents while growing up, too, as he recalled in his often harrowing memoir.
The poet remembers being thrown into a wall at the age of just three for the crime of getting upset over his missing father. Shane also talks about occasions when he had been beaten so severely that he lost consciousness.
No blood ties
But the man responsible for all the abuse, Morris Baker, wasn’t, in fact, Denise’s real dad, or Shane’s real grandad. In fact, he had no blood ties to them whatsoever.
Morris had married into the family as the fifth husband of Shane’s grandmother. And his reign of terror only stopped when he was left by his wife more than a decade after the abduction.
Little sympathy
Shane has little sympathy for his grandmother who, as he wrote in his memoir, “watched my grandfather kill me since I was three.” He told The Guardian, “I never got the impression that she did not have a great degree of power in that relationship.”
He went on, “[She had]... maybe most of the power. I would point out that before she kidnapped me, she took my mother from her father. The odds are that it was her idea to begin with.”
Off the hook
And Shane has no time for those who try to let his abductors, and tormentors, off the hook, either. He said, “People want to find a way to justify the behaviour of at least one of my grandparents; to make that okay.”
He continued, “You know: maybe they were just doing what they thought was best? Which I find — it’s very shocking.” Shane also revealed that his grandparents had actively discouraged him from ever tracking down his dad, too.
Psychic injury
Shane told the same newspaper that although he had been terrified of his abductors, he was also terrified about the possibility of being abducted again. The poet said, “It seems like a contradiction.”
“But because the large psychic injury from which so much of my life seems to have flowed happened when I was taken from my father — and despite the fact it’s my grandparents who did it — I had a great terror of it happening again.”
“Constant sense of danger”
The fear affected Shane so much that he would go to bed in his day clothes in case he quickly had to run to safety. He said, “This sense that everything could disappear at any moment — all of this has to do, I’m certain now, with the kidnapping.”
He further explained, “The terror of that injury being inflicted again was considerably more significant than the constant sense of danger and threat that I felt being in that house, which was just my day-to-day life. People get used to all kinds of things.”
Local phone book
But as Shane got older, he started to better comprehend exactly what his grandparents had taken away from him. And despite their poisonous attitudes, the poet also began to accept that his father shouldn’t have become someone that he hated.
By this point, the family had moved back to California, close to where he had spent the first few years of his life. And as a 16-year-old, in 1992 he discovered his dad’s name, Stanley McCrae, in the local phone book.
Police distrust
Shane managed to pluck up the courage to make the call. And although his book wraps up before their reunion, the poet has publicly spoken about how they managed to forge a relationship in its aftermath.
According to The Guardian, Shane had been particularly interested in why his father hadn’t simply called the cops on learning that his son had been taken away. Stanley argued that the Oregon police would have sided with the white grandparents named on the birth certificate instead of a man of color.
Taking its toll
But it was only when Shane left high school and started studying at his local community college that the emotional impact of his childhood experiences really started to take its toll.
He explained, “I had this feeling for about a year when I just wanted to cry all the time. I was really conscious of it, but I didn’t know why. There didn’t seem to be any precipitating event.”
Wanting to cry
Shane went on to add, “And just as strong as the feeling that I wanted to cry all the time, was the feeling that I wasn’t crying at any time — the feeling that something was holding it back.”
“And that’s the same thing that I have in regard to confronting these difficult memories.” Luckily, Shane managed to complete all of his studies and move on to even better things.
Fine arts program
Firstly, an Iowa writers’ workshop offered Shane a place on their esteemed master of fine arts program. Here, he was able to further process exactly what had happened to him as a youngster through the written word.
In something of a career pivot, Shane then went on to study at law school. But after graduating, he abandoned all of his legal ambitions to instead concentrate on making it as a poet.
“Through clenched teeth”
Shane subsequently landed a place on a prestigious poetry workshop run by Jorie Graham. The latter told The New York Times, “It seemed at the start that he didn’t know if he should be there, if he wanted to be there.”
Graham went on to add, “But, as we say, ‘he had an ear.’ He wrote a slightly conventional poem, and his heart was tight, and his natural voice was through clenched teeth.”
Repressed anger
Graham could sense that Shane’s work was coming from a deep, dark place. He said, “I felt anger on his page, repressed anger. I felt he had been beaten down by some great force — some injustice beyond the injustice of being Black in America.”
“But I could not break through to it.” The tutor then spoke of an office meeting in which Shane began to offload some of his personal trauma. “I thought, ‘Here it is, here, we go, his ear is released,’” Graham recalled.
School struggles
Shane’s progress was all the more remarkable for the fact that he had struggled at school. After taking a standardized exam as a 10th-grader, it was determined that his writing was at a grade two levels below. The future poet ended up retaking the whole year as a result.
Shane also found it hard to make friends, and he would often gravitate toward the back of the classrooms for lessons. In fact, he ended up dropping out before graduating, instead studying for a diploma equivalent.
Poetry debut
In 2011 McCrae published Mule, his debut full-length poetry collection, which centered on coming into existence. He told The Guardian how therapeutic he found that process, adding, “A poem tends to benefit from not too much deliberation beforehand.”
“There’s no context according to which you need to give yourself permission except in so far as to write at all. The more you think about the writing you’re doing, the more the writing you’re doing is going to suffer.”
Jim Limber
Many of Shane’s works have tackled how people of color have been treated by the white population. One particular poem is told from the perspective of mixed-race orphan Jim Limber, for example.
This was the man who was adopted by Confederacy president Jefferson Davis. And as his career progressed, Shane was able to publicly delve deeper into his very own experiences of racism.
Embracing Blackness
Thankfully, Shane has found it relatively easy coming to terms with his true heritage. In fact, he told The Guardian that he’d always known that his grandparents’ inherently racist attitudes were abhorrent.
The poet added, “And while I lived this sense of feeling both Black and not Black, at a certain point, when I was 20, I went through a phase where I was very consciously trying to embrace my Blackness, and it didn’t feel difficult.”
Exciting and exploratory
Shane went on to explain that he had immersed himself in Black culture, from philosophy to art, in a bid to better understand what it meant to be a person of color.
He said, “It was more exciting and exploratory than feeling there was something in there that I needed to repair.” And the issue of race has been at the forefront of much of Shane’s poetic works.
Reasonable question
But as Shane told The Guardian, the process of coming to terms with his childhood trauma was still very much ongoing. He recalled, “The other day I did an interview and there was a fact-checking process and someone asked, were your grandparents ever charged?”
“And the reflexive thought I had was, ‘That’s ridiculous, of course not, what do you mean?’ And I had to stop and think about it for a second; and think, no, that’s a perfectly reasonable question. It is a very slow process acclimatizing oneself to a harm with which one has lived one’s entire life.”
Memory loss
There are still certain parts of Shane’s past that he’s buried so deep within that he can no longer remember them. He explained, “The most visceral experience of memory-loss is the feeling that the memories might return.”
He went on, “That’s the most difficult feeling in relation to it… My defences against it are very practised, because I’ve been doing it for decades. And so when I start to get that heavy feeling of sadness, my brain starts working to stop it happening.”
Acceptance stage
And although penning his memoir was by no means a comfortable experience, Shane did take some comfort from the process. Referring to the gaslighting behavior of his grandparents, he told The Guardian, “Writing the book was the first time I’ve really thought about it very hard.”
He continued, “In that sense it has been very distressing psychologically and has caused a lot of personal unhappiness. But I’m glad that I wrote it.” In fact, it was only through writing the memoir that Shane accepted once and for all that he’d been abducted.
Sudden realization
Shane went on to explain, “In the ’90s, gang crime is something we were obsessed with. And in the ’80s, kidnapping was a thing that was really on the mind of folks a lot.”
“I remember thinking: what would happen if that happened to me? Not really understanding that I was in the midst of one. It had already happened to me.” It was a realization that the poet also spoke about in his interview with The New York Times.
Growing up kidnapped
Shane said, “I had used the phrase before — ‘growing up kidnapped’ — but somehow used it without it really sinking in. It was a thing that I was aware of as, ‘This is technically true,’ but without really understanding what that means.”
And the poet also maintained that the way in which his grandparents raised him also stunted his emotional growth. He added, “I had difficulty conjuring up feelings about, like, when my grandmother died.”
Absence of feelings
Shane continued, “I was like, ‘Okay, well, here’s something I’m supposed to feel. And I couldn’t. I was aware that being taken from my father when I was, and my subsequent experiences, really broke something in my ability to connect with family that is generationally before me.”
He went on, “What I feel is the absence of feeling things that I should.” Shane’s grandparents both died before the memoir which delved deep into the trauma they had inflicted hit the shelves.
Immensely regretful
But Shane’s mother Denise has been able to read it, although it’s not clear exactly what she’s made of it. The poet told The Guardian, “I think that her sense of these events is very complicated.”
He explained, “I think she might feel immensely regretful about it, but the size of the regret is, perhaps, paradoxically so big that she can’t really acknowledge her role in it.” Luckily, Shane does know what the press thinks of the book.
Rave reviews
Yes, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun received rave reviews on its 2023 release. The New York Times drew comparisons with Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, describing it as more of a “250-page avant-garde prose poem” than a conventional memoir.
It added, “McCrae’s sentences are constantly stating and retracting, moving forward and retreating, establishing a perimeter around an event while trying to penetrate it, to enter the chalk outline drawn around a body long buried, that of the boy McCrae was before he was taken.”
Living his best life
So how is the grown-up Shane faring now? Well, he now appears to be living his best life. The poet resides with his wife and teenage daughter in upper Manhattan and works at Columbia University as a creative writing teacher.
He also has no fewer than ten published poetry volumes to his name, including the T.S. Eliot prize-shortlisted Sometimes I Never Suffered. “I am constantly in a state of amazement that I get to live the life that I do,” he told The Guardian.
Astronomical odds
But that doesn’t mean Shane is entirely free of any hang-ups. He said, “I never lose the awareness of the unlikeliness of it. And of course, that means I worry about it, too.”
But overall, the acclaimed poet manages to think about his life “with gratitude. That things have worked out even as well as they have: the odds against it are astronomical.”
Righting a wrong
And decades after he was cruelly robbed of his rightful honor, Stanley has now been added to Shane’s birth certificate. The latter told The New York Times, “I’m glad that’s happening.”
“Me changing my name to his last name when I was in my very early 20s was really important, and that was very meaningful to me. The public acknowledgment of him as my father had felt as if I was doing some small thing to right a wrong.”